Jetty distribution vs hightide

What exactly is the difference? I've been using Jetty 8.0.0 lately and when I try the distribution download I cannot get neither WebSockets nor Servlet 3.0 @WebServlet annotation to work. If I use hi开发者_StackOverflow社区ghtide, it just works.

What is the point of the distribution?

I'm interested in the difference too, and what's online is confusing. Here's Jesse McConnell's ( https://stackoverflow.com/users/1185262/jesse-mcconnell ) answer to my just-posted question on the [jetty-users] mailing list ( http://jetty.4.n6.nabble.com/jetty-users-jetty-versions-tt3675449.html ):

yes, hightide is just the jetty-distribution with some additions that we can not distribute from eclipse do to their IP restrictions.

I did a lot of digging around before I got that answer, so I'll include the results below for reference. I hope this helps.

Description from eclipse.org: The Jetty Hightide application server is a distribution of the jetty Web Server assembled at codehaus with additional services like JNDI, XA & JDBC preconfigured. For jetty-hightide-6 this is an optimized, patched rebuild of jetty-6, while for jetty-hightide-7 it is distribution based on the standard jetty-7 artifacts combined with other third party integrations. -- http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/about.php

Description from docs.codehaus.org: Hightide is an optimized, versioned distribution of the Jetty open source web container. It comes pre-integrated with a number of services usually only found in J2EE application servers, or which you would otherwise have to craft together yourself: JNDI, an XA transaction service, a JMS message fabric, and a JDBC accessible database. Thanks to Jetty's light weight, pluggable architecture, Hightide allows you to easily choose which of these services you want to use, or even replace them with others. -- http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Hightide+Documentation

FAQ: "What's the difference between Jetty from Mort Bay, Codehaus and/or Eclipse?" at wiki.eclipse.org: The latest releases of core jetty-7 and later are available from Eclipse, which use the org.eclipse.jetty packaging. For versions 6 of Jetty, plus some jetty-7 components such as RPMs, Debs, Hightide, use codehaus, which uses the org.mortbay packaging. -- http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/FAQ

However, the contents of the two distributions (see 'Downloads' below) both use the o.e.j packaging, so I don't think the answer is entirely correct.

Mentions of features at http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty:

• The Hightide distribution of jetty contains an example webapp that uses JAAS. -- http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Feature/JAAS
• Jetty supports java:comp/env lookups in web apps. This is an optional feature and you need to do some setup. However, if you are using the Hightide distribution of Jetty, this feature is already fully enabled, so you can skip any setup steps, and just read the sections on how to put objects into Jetty's JNDI so that you can retrieve them at runtime. -- http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Feature/JNDI
• Annotation processing is not enabled by default by the standard jetty distribution, only by the Hightide distribution. -- http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Feature/Annotations

Downloads: Version numbers seem in-sync:

• http://download.eclipse.org/jetty/8.1.4.v20120524/dist/
• http://dist.codehaus.org/jetty/jetty-hightide-8.1.4/

After a cursory look, the contents look extremely similar.